Book Review: Barclay turns real-life tragedy into twisting plot

Trust Toronto’s Linwood Barclay to whisk both current trends and actual events into his best-selling crime fiction — this time blending a famous U.S. court case with the genuine plague of internet trolling to come up with another fast-moving and surprising work.

The memorable real-life case Barclay draws on involved a rich 16-year-old American who famously got probation after a drunken car accident that killed four, after his lawyer successfully argued he was a victim of “affluenza” — that he’d been so pampered and spoiled that he had no sense of right and wrong and so shouldn’t be jailed for his actions.

That argument also works in the fictional Parting Shot case of Jeremy Pilford, an 18-year-old sentenced only to probation after being convicted of drunkenly stealing a Porsche and mowing down a young woman.

As a result of the court’s decision, Jeremy has become universally reviled, and derisively dubbed the Big Baby. His wealthy mother hasn’t exactly blossomed in the spotlight, either.

Since this is the 21st century, the scorn rains down on the family not just from local antagonists, but from the entire internet universe, and naturally includes threats on Big Baby’s life.

Enter his great-aunt Madeline Plimpton, former publisher of the now-defunct newspaper of the small community of Promise Falls, New York, who turns to private investigator Cal Weaver to protect Jeremy’s life.

Weaver will be familiar to readers of Barclay’s previous Promise Falls-based novels, who will know his tragic family history as well as previous detecting ventures. Since he’s a detective, not merely a bodyguard, he can’t help going beyond his basic assignment from Plimpton.

Also familiar to earlier readers will be Parting Shot’s other main character, the aging and overweight police Detective Barry Duckworth. He, too, is dealing with a young man in trouble, in his case Brian Gaffney, a naïve fellow who disappeared for a couple of days and has returned to the world with a rough tattoo inked onto his back accusing him of killing someone named Sean.

No one seems to know who Sean might be, unless it’s a neighbour’s dog that Brian ran over years back. But the tattoo mutilation eventually reminds Duckworth of a much worse recent case, a man acquitted of molesting a young mentally challenged girl, and who then was permanently and hideously disfigured in an assault featuring unknown assailants and a ferocious dog.

That and other forms and threats of gruesome revenge, Duckworth discovers, are features of a website evidently dedicated to punishing those who go unpunished by the justice system — vigilantism that may or may not also extend to those tormenting Jeremy Pilford online.

The twistings involved in both Weaver’s case and Ducworth’s are complicated and occasionally dangerous, as well as pathetic, tragic, and ultimately surprising, even to the point, occasionally, of unlikely.

But the real virtues of Barclay’s best-selling fiction lie in his characters, not just his plots. Families are as muddled and complicated in his novels as they are in life, generally bolstered by variations of loyalty and love as well as, sometimes, terrible forms of betrayal.

Most to the point in Parting Shot, neither Cal Weaver nor Barry Duckworth is a hero, but both are dogged in their efforts towards facts, truth and justice. They’re not extra-brave or extra-smart — they’re just, thankfully, decent humans doing their best with the lives they’ve been handed.